Friday, May 22, 2009

Conservative, religious young women: Reader Whiskey claims that young, religious, and conservative women are as rare as hen's teeth. Using GSS data (N = 660), I looked at women ages 20-29 for the years 2000-2008. I found that 11% are both conservative (extremely, regular, and slightly) and attend church at least once a month. If we look at either/or, 37.9% of young women go to church at least monthly, and 24.9% of them are conservative.

Over the past 4 or 5 years, I've attended three different parishes. Each of them had the same situation: a sex ratio among people in their twenties of about 2-3 girls for each guy. The women would often talk about how it was hard to find a good, religious guy. One friendly, attractive girl I knew became a nun in her late twenties. I'm guessing that a decade of bad luck made her decide against marriage.

References to parishes and a nun makes it evident that you're talking about Catholicism. I'm rather surprised about the gender imbalance among younger people, as I'd always thought that was something more associated with evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant denominations. Catholicism's more patriarchal structure and outlook would seem to be more appealing to men.

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"The creation myth was the essential bond that held the tribe together. It provided its believers with a unique identity, commanded their fidelity, strengthened order, vouchsafed law, encouraged valor and sacrifice, and offered meaning to the cycles of life and death. No tribe could survive long without the meaning of its existence defined by a creation story. The option was to weaken, dissolve, and die." ~ E.O. Wilson